Courses

Humans, as Porphyry influentially defined us long ago, are “the rational mortal animal”: an animal, because a living thing; mortal, because we are not gods; and rational, because we – alone among mortal things – have reason. Or so holds a standard taxonomy, which separates humans from a homogeneously irrational mass of dogs, horses, crows, oysters, apes, and so on. The claim to having reason is also the claim to have free will: to be morally responsible, to be a legal subject, to be a citizen, and to have ownership over oneself and one’s actions. And the corollary claim that other things lack reason offers them up to supposedly rational subjects as objects, as property, as chattel, as things to be cultivated, perhaps, but never really to be cared for.

The “Human Limits in the Middle Ages” seminar will lean on the question of humans as the rational form of life, engaging with (mostly) medieval works as well as later 20th and 21st century philosophical texts (eg Jacques Derrida, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Orlando Patterson). We will explore how the claims to the possession of reason and freedom underlay debates about enslavement, gender hierarchies, racialization, and other ways of denying certain human populations resources and exposing them to premature death.

Apart from nonliterary genres like law and theology, and major works like Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale” and his “Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” readings will include travel and contact literature like Gerald of Wales’ History and Topography of Ireland, the Book of John Mandeville, and The Canarian, about a mostly inept French attempt to conquer the Canary Islands in 1402, a kind of “practice run” for the European conquest of the Americas; two treatments of reason’s relationship to animality and the divine, one a universally read philosophical dialog (Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy) and the other a philosophical novel (ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan, a key influence on Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe); and Middle English works on racial polities and animalized humans (Sir Gowther, the King of Tars, and various antisemitic legends from Middle English infancy gospels). We will also engage with works somewhat less anxious about human difference, like Marie de France’s Lais.